RECORDS ACCESS ADDRESSED

Sacramento 
The Senate and Assembly are taking different approaches to dousing the firestorm over provisions approved with the state budget that would make it optional for local governments to comply with parts of California’s open records act.

Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles, said Wednesday the Assembly plans to vote today on an amended bill that would preserve the full California Public Records Act. The budget measure causing controversy was adopted to save the state from having to reimburse local governments for certain costs of following the law.

“To be clear, this means that the California Public Records Act will remain intact without any changes as part of the budget,” Pérez said.

The budget provisions excused local governments from responding to records requests within 10 days, providing electronic records and helping citizens form requests for records that actually exist — creating a last-minute stir among media and open-government groups.

Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said the Senate would refuse to take up the Assembly’s bill until there is proof that a local agency is not complying with the law.

Instead, Steinberg and Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said they would introduce a constitutional amendment today to be placed on the June 2014 statewide ballot requiring local governments to fund all provisions of the records law. The amendment would be required because, without it, the constitution bars the Legislature from imposing unfunded mandates on local governments.

“The amendment will clarify that this controversy was never about weakening the Public Records Act,” Steinberg said. “It instead is about whether state taxpayers pay the bill for what city and county officials should be doing on their own.”

The senators said they also would consider making the Legislature subject to the state’s open records law, as opposed to its own less stringent rules.

“We all agree that Californians have a right to know and should continue to have prompt access to public records, and I support enshrining these protections in California’s Constitution,” he said.

The budget proposal in question was originally put forth by Brown, after a commission ruled that the state would have to reimburse local governments for the costs of complying with the public-records provisions in question. By declining to fund such reimbursements, the budget he proposed would have nullified the requirements.

U-T Watchdog reported on the proposed rollback of transparency in February, but policymakers and advocates largely ignored the issue until this past weekend. Starting at that time, several newspapers ran news stories and editorials in defense of the open-records requirements.

San Diego Mayor Bob Filner pledged Wednesday to comply with the Public Records Act regardless of how the Legislature responds.

“I believe in transparency,” Filner said in an interview. “We’re trying to open up the whole process.”

Filner said the city does receive a lot of requests.

“It takes a lot of resources. I am not talking just the press. The press, we expect. It’s the lawyers and (other) people. I just saw a list of 20 this week. Two were from the press. Eighteen were from lawyers or community groups,” Filner said.

He added the city hopes to post all of its public records online.

Separately, Councilman Scott Sherman on Wednesday proposed a “San Diego Public Records Act” that would establish the city’s policy of responding to requests within 10 days, providing electronic records in their original format and attaching a written reason if a request is denied.

“This law will ensure that open and transparent government in San Diego will never be undermined by Sacramento,” Sherman said in his announcement.

The next meeting of the city’s committee that would take up the proposal is July 10.

Greg Cox, chairman of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, said the agencies’ compliance policies will remain unchanged.

“Regardless of what the state does, the county of San Diego will continue our current practices on public information regardless of reimbursement,” Cox said.

Despite a growing chorus of local officials promising to act voluntarily, open-government and media advocates have been pressing Brown to veto the bill, along with putting increasing pressure on lawmakers.

The Brown administration and Democratic lawmakers maintain the budget as passed would not weaken the records act. The bill on the governor’s desk would mandate that governments at their first regularly scheduled public meeting of the year announce whether they plan to comply with the open-records provisions of their own volition, even though the law does not require it.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated state costs to reimburse local governments could be in the tens of millions of dollars annually out of the state’s $96.3 billion budget. The Senate’s proposal would, at least temporarily, suspend the mandate and put local governments on the hook for complying with the law.

It takes a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot. However, the governor is not required to sign such a measure for it to be placed on the ballot.